The Henry Knox Cannon Trail: Monuments and Dedication

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Hudson River Valley Institute’s Advisory Board member, Ms. Denise Doring VanBuren, helped to dedicate the latest monument at the start point of the Henry Knox Cannon Trail (HKCT) at Crown Point State Historic Site on 13 May 2017.

The fifty-six monuments (thirty in New York) erected by New York and Massachusetts in 1927 commemorate an epic journey of about fifty-six days by Colonel Knox and his teamsters from Fort Ticonderoga, New York, to Boston, Massachusetts. The NYS Daughters of the American Revolution generously helped fund the project. Crown Point was the point of origin for twenty-nine cannons hauled from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1775-1776.

Since 1999 the Hudson River Valley National Heritage (HRVNHA) and the Hudson River Valley Institute (HRVI) at Marist College have been interpreting the Henry Knox Cannon Trail (HKCT) from Crown Point, New York, to Boston, Massachusetts, as a route of interest for heritage tourists.

Colonel Henry Knox arrived at Fort Ticonderoga on the evening of December 5, 1775, accompanied by his nineteen-year-old brother William and a servant, Miller. Early the next day, assisted by the garrison of Fort Ticonderoga, he began to move the fifty-nine cannons and mortars. By January 4, 1776, the guns had begun to arrive in Albany. By January 24, Knox and his caravan reached Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the second week of March 1776, Washington stood in position to bombard the British in Boston from Dorchester Heights, using the array of heavy guns General Knox had laboriously dragged from Lake Champlain. General William Howe recognized that only the evacuation of his army could save it, and beginning on March 17th the victorious American army reclaimed its city.